Last week marked the twelfth anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica. The Guardian reported:
Hundreds of newly identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre were reburied Wednesday, their relatives sobbing as the thin green coffins were laid in the ground on the 12th anniversary of the mass wartime killing. More than 30,000 people turned out for the ceremony where a child read aloud the names of the 465 victims identified after being found in the many mass graves around Srebrenica. Before the ceremony, sobbing women moved among the coffins, searching for their loved ones' names and hugging each other for comfort....Every year, more victims' bodies are found in dozens of mass graves around Srebrenica. DNA tests and other forensic methods have led to the identification and burial of more than 3,000 victims, including Wednesday's 465.
The report doesn't say this, but the harrowing work of identifying the victims' remains is carried out by an organisation called the International Commission on Missing Persons. The organisation was described at length in The Scotsman a few months ago, and I refer you to that article again. (I paid tribute to its work in this post.) I can't imagine what solace for the victims' families would entail, but the cause of historical truth and accounting for genocide depends on people such as the ICMP.
Also, on this subject, see a recent long article by Ed Vulliamy of The Guardian, who covered the war in Bosnia with singular courage and skill. Ed worries, with reason, that the symbol of Srebrenica may occlude historical reckoning for the other barbarities committed by Bosnian Serbs (and of course orchestrated by Slobodan Milosevic's regime):
It is time to confront a bitter reality: that the estimable and intense focus on Srebrenica, and the massacre’s iconographic centrality in the memory of the slaughter in Bosnia, is double-edged. The fact is that Srebrenica - both the brutality of the killing and calculated betrayal by the so-called ‘International Community’ - was a not an isolated event; it was the culmination of what had been happening, and was allowed to happen by the West, for more than three years before the massacre. Srebrenica involved the avoidable slaughter of 8,000 people over five days, after the equally avoidable mass-murder of hundreds of thousands of others over three years. Srebrenica is the emblem of those other massacres, concentration camps, savage ‘ethnic cleansing’ on a vast scale, organised mass rape, relentless shelling of civilians - women and children - and of hospitals - and the bloody siege of a great capital, Sarajevo, while the ‘international community’ either connived with the Serbs (as in the cases of Paris and London) or else looked on and dithered, forbidding the Bosnians to arm themselves and mount effective resistance to the Serbian juggernaut.
